Driving Principles - CEO Tom La Sorda

FORBES MAGAZINE - - Tom LaSorda, 52, isn't the black sheep of his family, but he certainly stands out. Despite being brought up in a family of blue-collar, unionized Chrysler workers and having a grandfather who was jailed for inciting a strike against the company, LaSorda grew up to become the automaker's CEO.

In total, four generations of LaSordas have worked for Chrysler, now a unit of DaimlerChrysler (nyse: DCX - news - people ). The closest anyone got to management was LaSorda's dad, Frank, who was president of his union, Local 444 of the Canadian Auto Workers.

Surprisingly, crossing over into management wasn't too difficult for LaSorda. While attending the University of Windsor in Windsor, Canada, where he grew up, LaSorda supported himself by bagging groceries at the A&P and working summers on the assembly line at Kelsey Hayes, a company that made wheels. He realized pretty quickly that manual labor wasn't for him. "I always wanted to run something," says LaSorda. "I wanted to make money."

When he graduated from college in 1977, he not only took a job in management, he went to work for General Motors (nyse: GM - news - people ), Chrysler's rival. During his 23 years at GM, LaSorda earned a reputation for turning divisions around. That's exactly what he did with GM's Opel Eisenach plant in East Germany. When LaSorda arrived in 1991, the factory's 12,000 workers were producing 70,000 vehicles. After his two-year stint, 1,800 workers were making 165,000 cars.

Despite his success at GM, LaSorda returned to Chrysler, "the family firm," in 2000 and became CEO in 2005. For now, Chrysler isn't suffering as much as GM or Ford (nyse: F - news - people ).

But a major test of LaSorda's turnaround skills isn't too far down the road. In late July, Chrysler reported that profits at its parent company, DaimlerChrysler, had more than doubled, while earnings from the Chrysler Group unit plummeted to $65 million, from $695 million in the same period a year ago. In the third quarter, the company expects to lose $600 million. LaSorda's task is tougher than any he faced at GM or the A&P: cut costs, win health care concessions from union members and get consumers to buy Chrysler vehicles without hefty incentives. -- Hannah Clark

In Pictures: My Big Break

Tom LaSorda: I grew up in a family of nine children, in a home that was about 900 square feet. My dad was an auto worker--so were both my grandfathers, and so was my mother's grandfather, so four generations of LaSordas worked in the auto industry. My identical twin brother and I were the first in our family who went through university. My parents didn't have a lot of money, but education was important to them. Once, my father told me that he would re-mortgage the house to put me through college. I'll never forget that as long as I live. But we paid our own way, bagging groceries at the A&P during the school year. In the summers, we did factory work.

In 1974, the summer after my freshman year of college, we both took jobs at Kelsey Hayes, an independent company making wheels for the big auto firms. We would weld the rims to the middle part, which they used to call the spider. It was very, very hot. My girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, loved it, because I was moving these heavy wheels around and I really bulked up. But while we were slugging it out in there, in the heat and the sweat and the noise, I said to myself, "The money's great, but I'm staying in school, because I'm not doing this for a living." Now, all that bulk has moved around my body.

My father's ethical lessons have stayed with me to this day. My twin brother Tony failed seventh grade because he was busy messing around with girls. I walked home crying, telling him I would fail eighth grade so he could catch up. My dad, who was a strict Italian, gave me more trouble for talking about purposefully failing than he gave Tony for actually flunking.

In 1975, when I started my first business venture, my father derailed it for the sake of ethics. At that time, the Detroit Tigers had a great pitcher, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych. We lived in Windsor, Canada, and a buddy and I decided we were going to go across the river to Detroit, buy a bunch of T-shirts with Fidrych's picture on them, sell them in Canada and get wealthy.

I brought home a huge box of T-shirts and took it down to the basement. My dad said, "What's in there?" I said, "Mark 'The Bird' Fidrych T-shirts. We're going to sell them and make a lot of money." Dad said, "Do you have permission from the Tigers to sell those? What legal right do you have to sell those?" I said, "What do you mean, what legal right?" He said, "If you're going to be in business, you have to have integrity. Everything has to be 100% legal. You're not keeping those shirts in my house." I had to take them back. I got less than what I had paid for them. It was an expensive lesson.

I try to use the lessons I learned from my parents in my job today. They always stressed respect and dignity to others. Integrity was always very important to them. Chrysler's decision to adopt a "make more, pay more," approach to health care is one result of this sense of responsibility. Among our non-unionized employees, those who make more pay a higher percentage of their health care premiums. I pay 100% of mine. When you're dealing with something as critical to families as health care, it's important that sacrifices be shared.